Women's Poetry and Popular Culture [Hardcover]

Bridging feminist and cultural studies, the book shows how British and American women poets often operate as cultural insiders. Individual chapters reassess major figures (H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath), alternative modernist poets (Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith), and contemporary poets (Ai, Carol Ann Duffy).CinemaScope Poetics: H.D., Helen, and Historical Epic Film The Poetry Picture Book: Stevie Smith and Children's Culture Uneasy Alliances: Gwendolyn Brooks, Ebony, and Whiteness Everyday Ariel: Sylvia Plath and the Dream Kitchen Killer Lyrics: Ai, Carol Ann Duffy, and the Media Monologue Key Notes: Manifesto for Women's Poetry Studies

Bryant (Univ. of Florida) offers a lively interrogation of 'women's poetry' situated within and outside of constructions of popular, contemporary Western culture. Coalescing the poetry of H.D., Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Carol Ann Duffy with the complexities of a mainstream market comprising domestic advertising, juvenile literature, film, and tabloid journalism, Bryant's provocative work refutes historical conceptions of women's poetry as oppositional to popular culture. Rather, this refreshing fusion of feminist and cultural studies probes the dynamics of women infusing popular culture with poetry written by 'cultural insiders' to chronicle this delicate and complex interplay of popular culture and women's poetry. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. - CHOICE

'Fact: These days, the most exciting academic work on nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry is being done by women critics and scholars .The most recent example of such scholarship comes from P&PC hero and University of Florida English professor Marsha Bryant. They are studying poetries in the plural (not Poetry) as cultural forces and as ways of thinking linked both to the everyday and the ideal, with sources in mass, popular, and counter cultures, computers and archives, tranlÃn